Moshe Z. Marvit

Moshe Z. Marvit is an attorney and fellow at the Century Foundation, and co-author with Richard D. Kahlenberg of Why Labor Organizing Should Be a Civil Right: Rebuilding a Middle-Class Democracy by Enhancing Worker Voice.

Recent Articles

AP Photo/Nick Ut Service Employees International Union (SEIU) members protest for higher wages in downtown Los Angeles. E ach January, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases its annual data on union membership rates, labor braces itself to see how steeply the chart dips. This past year, the share of unionized workers declined 0.4 percent, to just 10.7 percent of wage and salary workers overall and a bare 6.4 percent of private-sector workers. As has been the case for many years now, the annual release represents the lowest year on record for unions. Even though it has been the long-stated policy of the federal government, as codified in the National Labor Relations Act, to encourage collective bargaining, federal labor law has proven unable to adequately protect workers in the exercise of their rights, and Congress has proven unwilling to pass even tepid reforms that would help them. As a result, the law does little to protect workers who face increasingly hostile and...